![\"\"](\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/churchill.jpg\")
\nSource: Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n
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In today’s world, why does it feel like we are fighting World War II all over again? I would argue that this isn’t just a feeling. We are<\/em> fighting the same war, and much of the danger now is as great as the danger was then.<\/p>\n The stakes today are the same stakes as in the 1930s and 1940s: Democracy vs. authoritarianism. Equality vs. hierarchy. Human rights vs. nationalism and ethnic supremacy. Reason and knowledge vs. propaganda and fabricated mythologies. The rule of law vs. elite power. Social and economic justice vs. entrenched privilege. International cooperation vs. militarism and domination.<\/p>\n Even the theaters of this ongoing war are much the same. Once again, Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Russia, is in the thick of it. America is in it, this time as a bad guy, not as a good guy — a shocking change. Asia is in it, more powerful than before. Israel has a new kind of role. The destabilizing effects of oil and oil money have brought the Middle East into the conflagration. New technologies have not only changed the battlefields, they’ve also enriched a new oligarchy of the tech elite, who have formed an alliance with the oil-and-kleptocracy oligarchy. <\/p>\n Today, do we have our Churchill and our Roosevelt?<\/p>\n We do not, and that is one of the most terrifying aspects of our problem. Instead we have Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n Most people, like me, are watching from the sidelines, feeling powerless and disoriented. Some good people choose to shut all this out to focus on their own families and their own struggles. I don’t blame them.<\/p>\n But some of us, like the worried people gathered around their radios in 1943, crave to know what is going on. <\/p>\n Though some of our media — the responsible media — do a remarkably good job, they cannot cover everything. The American media are under huge pressure not only from the Trump White House, but also from their corporate owners. <\/p>\n Fortunately, we ordinary people have access to technologies that were science fiction in 1943. We have a global network. We have powerful computers. We have AI. The enemies of democracy use all those things. We enemies of authoritarianism can use them, too.<\/p>\n Those technologies certainly include AI, though there is a trend — I think it is a prudish and misguided trend — to reject and disparage the use of AI. My attitude is that we should use AI for everything it’s good for, while being clear and up front about how we use it.<\/p>\n In 1943, radio was a new technology. Shortwave radio could reach across continents and oceans. The BBC, with its many transmitters, was heard round the world during World War II, translated into many languages. But Europeans weren’t limited to the BBC. Germany and Russia broadcast their propaganda in English during the war. Other countries also had radio stations — Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, and even the Vatican.<\/p>\n Listening to propaganda, and paying attention to news from afar, is an important part of modeling the world, whether now or in 1943. With AI, translation is no longer a problem.<\/p>\n In that spirit, Acorn Abbey is going live with a new, automated system for monitoring propaganda and news from afar. There are links on the page for this.<\/p>\n How it works is complicated. But, today, Claude can write complicated programs for us. Acorn Abbey’s global news digest is built with more than 12,000 lines of Claude-written computer code, running on Acorn Abbey’s servers.<\/p>\n Acorn Abbey’s mainstream digest is built on data retrieved from GDELT, a sophisticated open-source system which constantly monitors thousands of news outlets in more than 100 languages, yielding about a quarter of a million articles a day. Acorn Abbey’s system retrieves updates from GDELT every 15 minutes.<\/p>\n Acorn Abbey’s unofficial digest comes from the Russia-centered Telegram network. GDELT does not monitor social media, so Acorn Abbey’s code monitors Telegram directly, typically 1,500 posts a day. Posts that are not English are machine-translated by Acorn Abbey’s code.<\/p>\n Both the mainstream digest and the unofficial digest are written by Claude AI, working from many megabytes of data handed to it by the programming that gathers, translates, sorts, and does preliminary analysis on the data, based on criteria determined by Acorn Abbey. A key part of the mainstream analysis is quantifying how much attention an event is getting in international media.<\/p>\n Acorn Abbey could as easily have built a system for monitoring global attention to cats, or taxation, or even the environment and climate change. But we are in the middle of a war for global democracy, so that is what Acorn Abbey’s system is designed to monitor at present.<\/p>\n This is not meant as a substitute for the sources of information that we already use. Rather, it’s meant to fill in the gaps. Most of us don’t have any means of monitoring newspapers in Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Iran, Denmark, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Rome, or Bogota. But GDELT monitors those countries and many more, and, through GDELT, Acorn Abbey’s programming has access to all that data.<\/p>\n Acorn Abbey’s global news digest has been operating in test mode since early October. Refinements will continue. The pages are automatically generated once a day, around 6:30 a.m. Eastern time, from data collected during the previous 24 hours.<\/p>\n My blog posts here reflect my own values and political views. Acorn Abbey’s global news digest, though, is designed to take no side. It reports only on what it finds.<\/p>\n We are living through a counter-Enlightenment. A tiny global elite with vast wealth and authoritarian power sees an opportunity to take over the world — or at least big parts of the world — and run that world for their own profit and power, without interference from the rest of us, and in opposition to every noble thing the Enlightenment stands for. Warfare has drastically changed in the last 80 years. But this is war. And technology has developed new forms of shortwave radio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: Wikimedia Commons In today’s world, why does it feel like we are fighting World War II all over again? I would argue that this isn’t just a feeling. We are fighting the same war, and much of the danger now is as great as the danger was then. The stakes today are the same … Continue reading “Listening to the world, and to the propaganda”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34158,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34154\/revisions\/34158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Where is our Churchill?<\/h5>\n
Our tools are better now<\/h5>\n
The Acorn Abbey global news digest<\/h5>\n
What to focus on<\/h5>\n